KD and 7up on ex nihilo, free will and evil

[Cow Poke]

[Kind Debater]

On God creating people ex nihilo:

1. I don't see why it should not be possible for God, being omnipotent and all, to create a separate, creative consciousness that is capable of coming up with its own thoughts, thoughts that would not have originated with God (c.f. Jer 32:35, Hosea 8:4, Pr 16:1). You can say all you want to about God creating our personalities, interests, strengths and controlling our environment, but even those together don't dictate every thought that comes into our heads. If someone invents a new word or writes a song or even just asks, "What happens if I put these two things together?", those are creative ideas that can't be predetermined by looking at the knowable facts about that person.

2. I hypothesize that God "could not"* create someone who would be morally perfect in their life on Earth (that is, in a life outside of heaven where they are subject to temptations and physical weaknesses). Moral perfection -- in this case meaning moral perfection even when tested or tempted -- is a divine attribute, because as Jesus himself said, "God alone is good." I hypothesize that only God possesses divine attributes -- that if someone were morally perfect, they would have to have all the other divine attributes as well, including the attribute of eternal existence, which would mean they could not have been created.

Also, since God alone is good, for God to create someone else who was perfectly good, wouldn't that person's consciousness have to be the same as God's -- i.e. wouldn't this other good person have to essentially be a fourth member of the Godhead, someone whose thoughts and will were perfectly aligned with the Father?

Furthermore, if God did create a morally perfect person, that person would be deserving of glory for their innate righteousness -- yet God does not share his glory with others (Is 42:8)

Feel free to provide a Biblical reference to disprove this.

*I am using "could not" in the sense that we used it in a previous discussion, something like "it would go against some higher law," not "can't" in the sense of "doesn't possess the physical power necessary"

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On a side note, since the old TWeb went down I have since learned what "without body, parts or passions" is supposed to mean. This is from Knowing God by J.I. Packer. Packer basically says that "without body" means not limited by space or distance, "without parts" means he is an integrated whole that never changes, and "without passions" doesn't mean he doesn't have emotions, but rather that his emotions "have the nature of deliberate, voluntary choices, and therefore are not of the same order as human passions at all."